Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Michigan

Change Region

comments

Susan J. Demas: #YesAllWomen: How everyday sexism poisons us all

Santa Barbara Rampage

A couple embrace before a memorial service for the victims and families of Friday's rampage at Harder Stadium on the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 in the Isla Vista area near Goleta, Calif. Sheriff's officials said Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara, stabbing three people to death at his apartment before shooting and killing three more in a crime spree through a nearby neighborhood. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)
(Chris Carlson | Associated Press)

When I was 7, I gripped my beautiful mother's hand, squirming as catcalls followed her all the way down a Chicago street.

Three years later, I was playing in our front yard when a car full of teenage boys stopped, telling me how pretty I was, asking if I had an older sister.

Throughout my childhood, my father's clients would call the house, telling me I was so polite I should be a secretary, a fine aspiration for a girl who wrote novellas and got all A's.

By the time I was 15, those men would ogle me. A couple drunkenly propositioned me. Everywhere I walked, from the halls of my high school to my job at the local library, I felt like a piece of meat.

After I was raped at 18, I shut down. I decided I would hide from men behind waves of flesh shielded by baggy clothes.

But even at nearly 300 pounds, there was the guy who masturbated to me in the subway. The catcalls didn't disappear. I still didn't feel safe walking alone at night.

As a woman, you're never fully safe. So finally at 27, after the birth of my child, I decided to just be myself.

The weight fell off. I dressed how I wanted. I ran on the Lansing River Trail at night. Eventually, I started climbing mountains.

I am not a Victorian Era-style ornamental wife to be kept behind closed doors. I am not a sexless sprite at a purity ball. I will not wear mom jeans and adhere to anyone's ideas of what a "good girl" is.

I am a person. I am not an object. I am not something to be won. You don't have to like me. But you are not entitled to me, my love or my body.

This epiphany didn't shield me from my bosses' advances. It didn't stop men from looking at my breasts instead of my face during conversations. It didn't stop people enraged by my columns from blasting me as a "bitch" or "whore," with promises to rape me and splatter my brains all over the ground.

But it helped me survive -- and recognize those reactions truly revealed others' weakness. I am stronger than the men trying to tear me down.

As my reward for writing this, I will get more emails with vicious insults. I will be told I'm ugly and unworthy of being raped. I will receive violent threats. This is what women who speak out still face.

Last week, Elliot Rodger allegedly embarked on a shooting spree at a California university, inspired by intense misogyny in his disturbing, 140-page manifesto.

This is exactly what women fear. But we have had enough. #YesAllWomen was born to break the silence on everyday sexism.

The reality is that Rodger's creepy sexual harassment and anguished demands for sex with beautiful women aren't unusual. They're similar to comments most women have encountered in our lives.